Roatan: West End - 72 Kts at anchor!

Tuesday, June 4, 2002

016-18.000 N
086-36.480 W

As I last reported, we escaped the Vortex at the Hole in the Wall at Jonesville and moved the boat around to the West End of Roatan. We stopped at the cays outside of French Harbor so taht we could dive at several sites there. We were amazed at the number of fish compared with the Jonesville area. I can only guess that the difference is the amount of fishing that takes place.

Entering the West End is pretty simple once you've been through the channel more than once. The first time it's a bit more nerve racking as the channel is at most 75 feet wide and only 8-10' deep over coral. It was a nice sunny day with flat seas when we crossed allowing a GREAT view of the coral heads sliding under the keel. With the water being so very clear, it's hard to judge depth, making the coral looks much closer, but we made it just fine. It took several times to get the anchor set as there's lots of sea grass. I dove on later and up-righted it so that the plow went in the way that it should.

The West End of Roatan is the primary hotel district. The major draw here is diving and there are at least 16 dive shops lining the single dirt road that runs through town. I had to laugh when I saw a speed bump on the roar as it's so full of pot holes that no one even notices the speed bump in comparison! All day long you see the dive boats moving back and forth to the dive mooring balls. Most of the people who come here are in their early 20s and all seems to dress alike. You can get PADI certified here for $138, which is incredibly cheap. We've heard that it's even cheaper in Utila.

There are some very high end resorts too. We're anchored off of the Luna Beach resort, which is used to film the incredibly tacky TV show "Temptation Island." We stopped in there, and other than having to fight off throngs of beautiful women, it was very nice! :-)

There has been no wind down here for weeks. I mean, zero, zip, nada. During the day you get 5 kts of land effect. At night it dies down to nothing. On Monday night, June 3, there was a very large thunderstorm that had been been way off the west end of the island for hours. Lots of lightening. I was laying in bed reading when the wind suddenly sprung up. By the time I got to the cockpit we easily had 30 kts of wind. I was very concerned about our holding, given the problems that we had anchoring, and tried to let out more chain as I only had a 5:1 scope. My first problem was that the anchor chain snubber was on and I couldn't get the chain far enough back to reach it. The tension on the snubber was so great that I couldn't get it off of the cleat.

The winds were now 40 to 50 kts, massive amounts of rain were coming sideways, there were 2-3' seas whipping past, it's pitch black and only when lightening struck nearby could you see 2 other boats anchored nearby and get a point of reference. BlueJacket likes to sail at anchor and we were tacking back and forth on the anchor chain. When we'd hit the end of the chain we would jerk to a stop and the boat would heel 10-15 degrees into the direction we were headed. Eventually the bow would come around and we'd repeat it to the other side. During one of these tacks I was able to get the snubber off, which probably was a mistake in retrospect. Unfortunately I had forgotten to take the chain off of the cleat in the chain locker, and when the chain tightened again, it slipped off of the chain gypsy and tightened onto the cleat. I couldn't get it off, nor could I put the snubber back on in any useful manner, so I decided that the best thing that I could do was to get back to the wheel and power forward.

Oops, the wheel! On a Freedom 40/40 the wheel is about 5' in diameter & easily comes off to store on the rail. This is great, especially when you're trying to move dive tanks past it. Of course, that's where the wheel was. I went forward to get it and when I got back to the cockpit I noted that the center span of the bimini had come out of the support eyes and made it very difficult to get it in. While fighting to get this big 5' wheel in, I managed to knock my large Northstar 961 display head off its mounts and onto the floor. There went my electronic point of reference. But I got the wheel on & began to steer into the wind.

Sue was on the VHF talking to another boat and a person on shore who told here that we appeared to be holding. I got the radar on & could see that we were holding steady at about 1/8 of a mile off the shore. The winds blew 40-50 kts for 20+ minutes and the storm lasted about 2 hours in total. When I looked at my instruments later, I saw a max wind speed of 72 kts! All in all I was too busy to be scared, but it was definately an exciting evening!
Log ID: 241